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Spotify's Top 10 most viral tracks Associated Press Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Updated 5:38 am, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 The following list represents the most viral tracks on Spotify, based on the number of people who shared it divided by the number who listened to it, from Monday, May 13, to Sunday, May 19, via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Spotify. Five Finger Death Punch, "Lift Me Up" (Prospect Park) Mariah Carey, "Beautiful" (The Island Def Jam Music Group) Daft Punk, "Get Lucky — Radio Edit" (Columbia Records) Fergie, Q-Tip and GoonRock, "A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got)" (Water Tower Music/Interscope) DJ Khaled, "No New Friends — SFTB Remix" (Cash Money Records Inc.) Various Artists, "Only Teardrops — Eurovision 2013 — Denmark" (MBO — The Music Business Organisation A/S)

If a service that mails recommended clothing and accessories to women isn’t up your alley, think about it this way: Stitch Fix is squarely at the intersection of both online and offline (so hot right now) and human and algorithm (even hotter). For $20, San Francisco-based Stitch Fix sends its members five items that have been personally selected for them based on a size and style questionnaire, their Pinterest page and other feedback they provide to an in-house stylist. They can apply the $20 toward buying the items, and ship the unwanted items back at no additional cost. And they can sign up for a monthly subscription, but don’t have to if they don’t want to. Over the past two years Stitch Fix has registered 80,000 users, and it still has a three-week-long wait list. In March it shipped 10,000 “Fixes,” with an average purchase of $100. That may be a relatively small business now, but it does seem effective. More than 80 percent of Fixes see one or more items purchased. And unlike nearly every other e-commerce business, there are no discounts. “We belive so strongly in our recommendations that we put our money where our mouth is and send the product to you,” said CEO Katrina Lake in a recent interview, noting that the $20 styling fee doesn’t cover the cost of two-way shipping and personalization by an actual human. While Lake said she might have imagined Stitch Fix would be a product for the fashion conscious (that’s the focus of some male-oriented competitors like TrunkClub), that doesn’t seem to be the case. “Our customer is the harried mom or the working gal. She normally buys at J.Crew or Banana Republic on sale, or The Gap,” said Lake, who did blogger outreach at Polyvore and went to Harvard Business School before founding the company. “We don’t do fast fashion, we don’t do the black and white cutout bodycon dress — we do a black-and-white blouse. It’s classic with a twist. We had a navy tulip print blouse that just flew,” she said. The challenge of honing those recommendations as a way to evolve the shopping mall experience has attracted Netflix’s former VP of data science engineering, Eric Colson, and Walmart.com’s former COO, Mike Smith, to the Stitch Fix executive team. They run analytics and operations, respectively. Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake It’s also bringing in a swarm of venture capitalists like Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley (he declined to comment) who’d like to invest in Stitch Fix, even though the company just raised a Series A round three months ago. The balance between the algorithm and the human clicked early this year. “Sales are doubling every month and the customers are rabidly excited,” said early Stitch Fix investor Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Anderson added of Lake, “She was a beaten down soldier in the fall. She was like ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Now it’s the total opposite. I tell her, ‘Don’t spend time raising money because we have more important things to do.’” (Lake, for her part, said it was an “open question” whether she would take the additional funding.) Of course, Stitch Fix is no sure bet. I spoke with one investor who passed on a previous round and noted, “Starting a department store is expensive and logistically complicated. They’re under-appreciating how good you have to be at sales.” Lake disagreed. “Where our model is really superior is we’re just inventory efficient,” she said. So sure, Stitch Fix employs 42 people in San Francisco and just secured a 90,000 square foot fulfillment center in South San Francisco, and is in no way profitable. But the company today sells 90 percent of the inventory of the 150 styles it buys per month — at full price.

While things have been quite of late, there is no doubt that yesterday was a Merger Monday given announcements from Yahoo and Tumblr, Seamless North America and GrubHub, and Vista Equity Partners announced acquisition of Websense. Stand alone deals are always interesting given the potential response - some companies do nothing, others quickly put other companies into play while others up the ante for an existing transaction.

As chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital specializing in blood clots in the leg, Lawrence “Rusty” Hofmann routinely got requests from patients around the world for a second opinion on a treatment or diagnosis. One patient from Australia was ready to mortgage her house to come see him in Palo Alto, Calif. Hofmann asked instead for her medical records and images—sent in PDFs and CDs, and referred her to a specialist in Melbourne. Still, it wasn’t until two years ago, when Hofmann’s then 8-year-old son was struck with a rare blood disorder, that the radiologist realized how lucky he was to have easy access to the world’s top experts. “That galvanized everything,” says Hofmann. “My son wouldn’t have gotten the care he needed. I got frustrated with patients who come see me, and who received the standard of care—which is 10 to 12 years old; what you want is state of the art.” In 2012, Hofmann formed ConsultingMD, a selection of 230 specialists culled from medical institutions such as Duke, UCSF, and Harvard, and considered experts in their field. He won’t disclose the number of cases the physicians have handled so far, but says that six out of ten cases resulted in a different treatment or diagnosis. There are no numbers on the frequency of second opinions. Medicare might pay in some cases for another surgical opinion; same with health insurance companies. Patients may still feel uneasy about seeking the opinion of another physician, and when they do they’re typically motivated by disappointment, as some studies have shown. One thing is clear though, misdiagnoses are common, deadly, and costly. According to research by Johns Hopkins, over the past 25 years diagnostic errors accounted for nearly 29% of insurance claims at a cost of almost $40 billion, and more often resulted in death. Medical centers such as Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, Partners HealthCare and MD Anderson offer second opinion services. Johns Hopkins charges $565 to review a case, and $250 to interpret an image. Rival WorldCare works with a consortium of hospitals that includes Duke, Mayo Clinic, and Partners; and Best Doctors boasts more than 53,000 physicians in its network. “When you start throwing out numbers, you miss the point; we’re skeptical of large number games,” says Owen Tripp, ConsultingMD’s chief executive, and formerly chief operating officer of Reputation.com. For example, Hofmann is listed in Best Doctors’ roster, although the company never contacted him. ConsultingMD has contracts with its specialists, and covers them for malpractice. It pays them on a per case basis, from $400 to several thousand dollars, a rate they can determine. ConsultingMD plans to make its money by offering its services to employers as a cost-saving tool, for a few dollars a month per employee. (Tripp won’t disclose amount, or the number of customers). ConsultingMD gathers the patient’s medical record, test results, and images in one file, and matches the patient with the right specialist—sometimes with the help of an algorithm. The start-up says it delivers a consultation within 48 hours—more or less what competitors promise. Venrock's $10 million investment will help ConsultingMD expand its network. Partner Bryan Roberts who now sits on its board is one of only two health IT investors on the Midas List. What if second opinions have the reverse effect of driving up costs? Says Hofmann: “It will lower costs, because experts know when to bring out the heavy guns, and when not to.”